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Friday, 5 March 2010

The latest "House of Comments" podcast with myself and Stuart Sharpe of the Sharpe's Opinion political blog is now live. The website for the podcasts is here and the sixteenth episode which we recorded on Tuesday 2nd Feb is available to downloadvia this page here (raw mp3 file here if you prefer). You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes here. Or you can listen to it right now here:

The format is to invite one or two other political bloggers each week and discuss a few of the stories that are making waves in the blogosphere.

This week we were joined by Libertarian and feminist blogger Juliet Samuel who blogs as Lazy Hyena and is also Emily Nomates on Guy News and Nelson AKA The Heresiarch from Heresy Corner.

We discussed cuts to BBC services by my namesake, whether the idea of network broadcasting is itself becoming obsolete, the general election leaders debates, Labour resurgence in the polls despite the bullying allegations against Gordon Brown and what the Lord Ashcroft situation says about party funding.

1 comment:

Just finished listening to House of Comments and I rather think you all missed the point of the BBC’s broadcasting model. As David Attenborough explains in his speech about the future of broadcasting (http://www.scribd.com/doc/22601976/The-Future-of-Public-Service-Broadcasting-by-Sir-David-Attenborough) the BBC was set up to make news, educational and cultural programs and only delved into entertainment to draw people to the educational stuff (I can personally attest that this model still works marvelously on iPlayer. I have never watched so many documentaries in all my life as I have in couple of years since it went live).

Programs like “Strictly Come Dancing” are not around because they are popular/entertaining per se, they exist because their popularity draws people to the BBC and exposes them to the BBC’s cultural programming. 6Music is under threat because it doesn’t fit well with the BBC model. It doesn’t draw a mass audience (Radio 1 & 2) or produce a cultural/educational output (Radio 3, 4 & 5). 6 Music is in a weird dead zone (unfortunately shared by my favorite channel BBC3) of producing excellent non-populist entertainment. Unfortunately, the BBC does not need this for its model to work. It does, however, need Radios 1 & 2. It’s essentially throwing out what it doesn’t need in order to protect the core BBC model from commercially driven attacks.

Another interesting future of broadcast was given by Stephen Fry if you’re interested and also comes as a podcast (http://www.stephenfry.com/2008/06/18/the-bbc-and-the-future-of-broadcasting/)